1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to broadcast recording and, particularly, to synching a recording time of a program scheduled for recording to the actual program broadcast time of that program.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of the VCR and its ability to record a television broadcast signal onto a video tape, individual recordings of television broadcasts became more accessible to consumers. As VCR technology advanced, users could program a VCR to begin recording the broadcast signal from a particular channel during a particular time period. In addition, there are now other types of television broadcast recorders, such as digital video recorders, available to consumers that record television programs onto a hard disk or other types of storage media.
Initially, many users found the user interface on VCRs, for programming the VCR to record a program in the future, difficult to use or understand. Now, many television broadcast recording devices are able to access a television program schedule and display the anticipated program schedule so that to select to record a scheduled program in the future, a user need only select the program block within the displayed television schedule and the recording device schedules itself to record the broadcast signal from the selected channel during the time period scheduled for the selected program in the anticipated program schedule.
While many programs actually broadcast during scheduled periods, there is potential for the actual broadcasting times of programs to vary from the anticipated schedule times. For example, causes of an actual broadcast time varying from a scheduled broadcast time include programs of indeterminate length, such as sports events and televised speeches, and local station overrides, such as local weather alerts where a scheduled program is still played from the local station in its entirety. When an actual broadcast time of a program varies from the scheduled broadcast time, then starting and stopping recordings based on an anticipated schedule time will result in only a recording a portion of the scheduled program. For example, if a user selects in a schedule to record a program scheduled to air from 7 PM to 8 PM, but the program actually starts broadcasting fifteen minutes late because it follows a football game that exceeded its scheduled time by fifteen minutes, then only the portion of the program airing from 7:15 PM to 8 PM is recorded and the user will miss getting to watch the last fifteen minutes of the program from the recording. Thus, while facilitating recording selections from an anticipated program schedule simplifies user interaction with a television broadcast recorder, the television broadcast recorder is limited because only portions of selected programs are recorded when actual broadcast times vary from the scheduled times.